A woman who beat her son to death for failing to learn parts of the koran by heart and then burned his body to destroy the evidence was today jailed for life.

Sara Ege, 33, was ordered to serve a minimum of 17 years by a judge at Cardiff crown court. She collapsed as the sentence was read out and had to be helped from the dock.

She had been praised as a “brilliant mother” to seven-year-old Yaseen, but was convicted of his murder by a jury at the same court last month. The court heard that Ege used a stick to beat Yaseen “like a dog” if he couldn’t recite passages from the holy book.

Judge Justice Wyn Williams told her: “This was a dreadful crime. On the day of Yaseen’s death, you had kept him home from school so he could devote himself to his study of the koran.

“He was memorising passages, but on that day Yaseen must have failed in some way and it was that which was a trigger for the beating which you suffered upon him.

“You killed your own son. At the time of the killing he was particularly vulnerable because of his age and his relative physical frailty. You abused a precious relationship of trust.”